Read Online Jennifer Scales and the Ancient Furnace by MaryJanice Davidson - Free Book Online Page B

flapping, she began to get me hang of gaining and losing altitude. Her wings were getting tired, though, and she looked down at the ground with both longing and fear.
    He seemed to read her mind. “As any pilot will tell you,” he called out, “landing is easy. Landing
well
is hard. Aim for the trampoline again, and try to lose altitude a few feet at a time.”
    As she began her descent, she found relaxing and re-stretching her wings even harder than flapping them continually. It was like dropping bit by bit in a shaky helicopter, and her stomach turned once or twice after particularly steep pitches.
    Looking down, she could see the trampoline far below, almost between her hind claws. She adjusted a bit to the left and headed for the center.
    The heavy whistling in the trees to the north should have warned her what was coming, but neither Jennifer nor her father noticed the sudden crosswind until too late. She felt it like a shove in the back. In a split second she lost her shape and balance, and found herself diving feet first at a sharp angle to the ground. The wildflowers rushed up to greet her.
    “
Tilt your wings
!” she heard her father cry.
    She leaned forward in a panic and drew even with the ground, belly skimming the tips of the taller sunflowers and reedy grasses. It was like her first experience with a bicycle as a child—she was moving fast, her muscles were frozen, and she had no idea how to stop.
    She passed out of the wildflower fields and into the bee fields, closer and closer to the ground. Dropping a leg to try to slow herself down was unthinkable; Jennifer had visions of tripping at thirty miles per hour and breaking her neck in the subsequent tumble. The best she could hope for was a glider landing on her belly. The grass looked soft…
    A short hillock was all it took for Jennifer’s right wing to catch the earth. The impact jarred her entire body, throwing her out of symmetry and sending her into exactly the kind of rolling tumble she had been trying to avoid—only this time, she was sent askew by the hit to her right side. Jennifer lost herself in a furious swirl of earth and sky.
    At last, she crashed into something that felt like rotted wood. Her head spun and buzzed, and a sickly sweet smell filled her nostrils.
    “Are you okay, Jennifer?” She heard her father’s voice above her.
    “Yeah…”
    “Good. Now get out of there!”
    A slow liquid oozed onto her belly. Thinking it was blood, she lifted her head up … and saw honey. Then she realized the buzzing wasn’t in her head at all.
    “Ah, sugar…”
    “Out! Out!” her father called. She could have sworn he was chuckling. Hundreds of black dots converged on her position. With another curse, she kicked her way out of the pile of broken honeycomb that her landing had destroyed. Of course, she had no way to run. It was crawl or fly, and Jennifer didn’t even stop to think. She just unfolded her wings, took two or three panicked steps with her hind legs, and then pushed herself up.
    Miraculously—or so it seemed to her—it worked. Ten feet up, then twenty, then she was over the wildflowers again, leaving the angry swarm of bees far behind.
    “Nice takeoff!” her father beamed as he swooped into position next to her. “I shouldn’t have bothered with the trampoline. All we had to do is plop you on top of a beehive, and you perfected your technique just fine.”
    “Hilarious, Dad. How the heck do I get down?”
    “Let’s try a bit farther north, by the sheep pastures. They don’t sting as hard.”
    “This isn’t funny…”
    “You didn’t see it from my angle.”
    “I could have maimed myself!”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. Like I said, it will take more than a beginner’s crash to hurt you. And no bug
you’ve
ever seen has a stinger long enough to pierce your hide. You could wear those bees as a winter coat. Now come on, we’ve got a landing to finish.”
    She followed him to the sheep pastures, but the words “no